Ündes Wen

Tusi (Ündes) Wen is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science from Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China. He specializes in the field of political economy and quantitative methodology, with a regional specialization in China and Inner Asia. His primary research interests include authoritarian institutions, collective action, and comparative democratization. He also researches the Inner Asian influences on China, such as the political economic legacies of the Qing Dynasty. His dissertation investigates the intended and unintended consequences of authoritarian control, and their implications for collective action and democratization. By studying institutional arrangements designed with the purpose of authoritarian control, his dissertation demonstrates how a boundedly rational autocrat can manipulate individual incentives for collective action, how such manipulation can affect the society’s political economic realities in the short-run, and how the citizens’ collective responses to such manipulation over time may transform the society and affect the prospect of revolution and democratization in the long-run.